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I'm contemplating upgrading my iMac's internal HDD and adding an additional SSD drive. Before I take the plunge, I just wondered if anyone had a walkthrough for copying all of my current programs and data, before I add the new drives please? (I am no expert, so please humour me!) I do use an external NAS set up for Time Machine backups; will those backups contain EVERYTHING I need to restore my ENTIRE system, after installing the new drives? If so, what exactly are the steps to do this please?

Finally, does anyone on here have experience of installing the new drives themselves? I've read and watched endless tutorials, plan to buy one of the specific toolkits for the job and hope to give it a go...doesn't look too difficult?!

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Sorry, I probably wasn't specific enough...I have read several of those similar guides, what I'm unsure about is if I can allocate my restore from Time Machine between my new HDD and SSD? As the SSD will probably be 500GB, it won't be large enough to handle everything on my old HDD (approx 800GB). Is there a way of allocating my applications/programs to the SSD and all my files etc to the HDD?

As I'm a bit out of my comfort zone, I just want to have every step covered, before I start!

There are many ways to go about doing what you want to - but if I understand the gist of your question, it seems that you want to use the most automated option, and that would be to simply restore your Time Machine backup to the new drive. Given that you have about 800GB of data and you plan to purchase a 500GB SSD, that will certainly be a problem.

You can choose to restore certain categories of data during the restore process, but that will not give you the 100% clone that I think you desire - and you're not going to be able to do it in a granular enough way to be able to pick and choose what comes back.

The easiest option would be to simply buy a more capacious SSD. Crucial sells their excellent m500 and m550 in 960GB and 1TB capacities for just under $500. That's actually quite the bargain, considering SSD prices of just a year ago would place that closer to $1000.

The other option would be to start migrating some of your less often used data over to an external drive now, before you even do the upgrade. See if you can live without having all of that data on the internal system drive and try to operate within the confines of that 500GB limit you spoke of. If you can't, then you know you need to go with a larger SSD. If the pricing doesn't agree with you, I'd imagine that by this time next year, that m500 (or m550) will be down by at least a 1/3 of the cost.

Liquid and computers don't mix. It might seem simple, but we see an incredible amount of people post here about spills. Keep drinks and other liquids away from your expensive electronics!

I'm also planning to update my current HDD from 1TB to 2TB. As I'm a photographer, my HDD is full of photos; would these steps solve the problem:

- As well as my NAS setup, which I use for my Time Machine backups, I also backup manually to a separate external HD. So, deleting all of images from my iMac HDD, which would bring that down to well below 500GB.

Your process should work fine. I would, however, recommend that you do a clean install of OS X and then migrate the data back from your Time Machine backup by way of the Migration Assistant (this runs automatically following a new install of OS X). To do this, you will want to create recovery media. The steps for doing so are detailed here: